Why must courts order cops to do their job?

Suzanne Smoke, left, from Alderville First Nations talks to a Peterborough police officer as protestors gather chanting Idle No More march on Jan. 11, 2013, waving flags and placards and briefly blocking an intersection in Peterborough, Ont. (Clifford Skarstedt/QMI Agency)

Related Videos

Topics

We didn’t ask for the changes. We certainly didn’t legislate them. But nonetheless it seems they’re here to stay.

That’s the only conclusion one can come to after reading Ontario Superior Court Justice David Brown’s decision regarding the Idle No More protests on the main line of the Toronto–Montreal CN rail.

The blockade began at 4 p.m. last Saturday. Shortly before 9:30 p.m., CN appeared before the court to seek an injunction to clear the tracks. Brown ordered the blockade to be ended by 12:01 a.m.

The blockade did in fact end, “yet the Ontario Provincial Police would not assist the local sheriff to ensure the order was served.”

The OPP made a discretionary call to not act — just as they did in response to a December injunction regarding a similar blockade on a CN line near Sarnia.

What does this mean? It means we’re screwed. Law enforcement has become selective and police now make decisions based on a whim, not according to the law.

“We seem to be drifting into dangerous waters in the life of the public affairs of this province when courts cannot predict, with any practical degree of certainty, whether police agencies will assist in enforcing court injunctions against demonstrators who will not voluntarily cease unlawful activities,” Brown wrote.

Read that again. It’s an eerie paragraph.

The police’s reluctance to enforce the law (and please take a moment to ponder how surreal it is that such a statement can be made in Canada) in this case is clearly related to the fallout from the 1995 Ipperwash conflict.

But that doesn’t mean a precedent hasn’t been set that will be followed by other activist groups, too.

The next round of Occupy? A flareup in the Tamil protests on the streets of Toronto? Students in a froth because they have to pay for their own education?

They will expect their lawless actions to be tolerated (like many of them already have been).

They will expect police to approach them with kid gloves.

They will expect a court to have to order the police to enforce the law. And when the law is enforced, they will try to argue before the highest authority that their constitutional rights have been violated.

But that is not the most alarming section in Brown’s decision: “I question why a landowner must resort to seeking a court injunction to stop the sort of unlawful conduct engaged in by the protesters in this case. It strikes me that the police enjoy adequate powers of arrest to deal with the unlawful conduct without the further need of a court injunction.”

In other words: Why does a person have to go to court in the first place to simply request that the police do their job and enforce the law? This places everyone’s security of person and property on very shaky footing.

And of course the situation is not black and white. What if one Aboriginal person violates the rights of another Aboriginal person?

Will police step in to bring about order in that situation? Or will they just make it up as they go along?

Yes, the rules have changed all right. And they’ll continue to change at the discretion of the lawless.

Because, as Justice Brown notes, it’s not like there’s anyone willing to show them otherwise.

About the author

Other Stories

Since 1980 the average cost overruns for the summer Olympics have been 252%. It's one of the more alarming facts Andrew Zimbalist has to share with Canadians and taxpayers across the country thinking over whether Toronto should bid for the 2024 summer Olympics.